Steins;Gate 0 – 22 – Another Logical Sacrifice

Thankfully, the latest setback does not shatter Hououin Kyouma just as soon as he makes his triumphant return; more importantly it does not rob Rintarou of his will to keep trying. It only forces him to jump back two days into the past and come up with a new plan. But first, they must determine what exactly is causing the convergence; it may not be the time machine itself.

Rintarou works it out with Daru and Maho. They know how to foil both Leskinen/Stratfor and DURPA, which leaves the Russians. When Nakabachi defected to Russia, they made the connection between his research and Kurisu’s. Thus, in order to prevent WWIII from occuring, they have to prevent that connection from being made.

The only way to do that is to eliminate Amadeus and all of the associated data. Without Kurisu’s memories, brain patterns, and research in digital form, Russia will never be able to complete the time machine, the war will be averted, and both Kurisu and Mayuri should be saved.

So the path to Steins;Gate requires yet another Kurisu-related sacrifice. As Amakurisu states more than once, she’s “just a program”, but it’s still unsurprisingly difficult for Rintarou and Maho to even consider deleting “her,” so similar she is to Kurisu, and yet also an individual personality in her own right.

Amakurisu has Maho send her to Rintarou’s phone, and the two enjoy a stroll together, that lasts through the night into the morning, with Rintarou showing her the city she doesn’t know and judges to be beautiful and worth saving.

Unlike her dead human self, Amakurisu live in a world where only things with a purpose exist (much like The Matrix). Her purpose is to cease existing so a better world can be unlocked. Like Kurisu, she’s ready and willing to assume that cost…but also like Kurisu, there’s a hint of sadness behind her reassuring smile.

Thanks to Daru’s improvement of D-Mail, the D-RINE (like the real-world LINE), Daru can send a save message only to himself telling him to break into VCU’s server and destroy the Amadeus AI data. Maho sends the necessary key and patch as an attachment, the Phone Microwave is fired up, and Amakurisu says her goodbyes.

When the sparks stop we end up with the divergence number of 1.123581—the Beta World Line, tantalizingly close to the 1.048596 of Steins Gate, yet not quite there. We’ll see how well Rintarou & Co. fare in the finale, which I suspect might run double-length (since there’s no episode 24).